Frank Shea

Frank Shea

Born

Occupation

Allegiance

Relatives

Origin

Hoxton

Status

Deceased

Frank B Shea (born 1939) or also known as Frankie Shea Jr. was the older brother of Frances Shea, Reggie Kray's first wife.

Originating from Hoxton, he occasionally drove the Kray twins around, and other members of The Firm in the early 1960s after selling them a car from a local garage. He found his sister after committing suicide in his flat, in 1967.

Both born to Elsie Shea, a Shoreditch born twenty-one year old skilled seamstress, and Frank Shea Sr., a woodworker aged twenty-six from Hoxton but of Irish descent, Frances or 'Franie' as she was commonly known, was just 16 when she opened the door to Reggie Kray, who was nearly 10 years older and had come calling for her brother Frankie, Frances's father, at her parents' home in Bethnal Green in 1960. The Shea's lived at 57 Ormsby Street in Hoxton, a long street of humble terraced cottages sandwiched between the Hackney and Kingsland Roads.

Reggie first met Frank Shea when he decided to look for a different car that the Vanguard he was driving at the time. Frank had a car lot in North London and although he had nothing that suited Reg, the pair struck a friendship that led to him becoming Reggie's driver. He was around eighteen years old when he first met the twins, and was living at 57 Ormsby Street in Shoreditch, with Frances Shea, his sister.

It has been said that Frankie Shea had got to know the twins as a visitor to the Regal when he was seventeen, and by the age of eighteen he had set himself up in business at a car lot in North London. Frankie was involved himself in a number of villainous enterprises, and his partner in crime in much of this was Chris Lambrianou, the older brother of Frankie’s old school friend Tony Lambrianou. Reggie and Franie fell in love and married at St James's Church in Bethnal Green in 1965, but tragically two years later at the age of just 23, Franie, who suffered from mental illness, committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills at Frank's flat.

Freddie Foreman states in his 2015 book, The Real Last Gangster, that Frank became an alcoholic after the Krays were convicted, and he committed suicide in the late 2000s.